The Unbridled Power of AIPAC

…and how it sets America’s morally bankrupt policy in the Middle East.

By Stephen M. Walt —

The official name for Israel’s latest assaulton Gaza is “Operation ProtectiveEdge.” A better name would be “OperationDéjà Vu.” As it has on severalprior occasions, Israel is usingweapons provided by American taxpayersto bombard the captive and impoverished Palestiniansin Gaza, where the death toll now tops1,000. As usual, the United States government is siding withIsrael, even though most American leaders understandIsrael instigated the latest round of violence,is not acting with restraint and that its actions makeWashington look callous and hypocritical in theeyes of most of the world.

This Orwellian situation is eloquent testimony tothe continued political clout of the American IsraelPublic Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the otherhardline elements of the Israel lobby. There is noother plausible explanation for the supine behaviorof Congress—including some of its most “progressive”members—or the shallow hypocrisy ofthe Obama administration, especially those officialsknown for their purported commitment tohuman rights.

The immediate cause of this latest one-sidedbloodletting was the kidnapping and murder ofthree Israeli hikers in the occupied West Bank, followedshortly thereafter by the kidnapping andfatal burning of a Palestinian teenager by severalIsraelis.

According to J.J. Goldberg’s reporting in theJewish newspaper Forward, the Netanyahu governmentblamed Hamas for the kidnappings withoutevidence and pretended the kidnapped Israeliswere still alive for several weeks, even though therewas evidence indicating the victims were alreadydead. It perpetrated this deception in order to whipup anti-Arab sentiment and make it easier to justifypunitive operations in the West Bank and Gaza.

Why Israel Went on a Rampage

And why did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahudecide to go on another rampage in Gaza?As Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Grouppoints out, the real motive is neither vengeance nora desire to protect Israel from Hamas’s rocket fire,which has been virtually non-existent over the pasttwo years and is largely ineffectual anyway.

Netanyahu’s real purpose was to undermine therecent agreement between Hamas and Fatah for aunity government. Given Netanyahu’s personalcommitment to keeping the West Bank and creatinga “greater Israel,” the last thing he wants is a unifiedPalestinian leadership that might press him toget serious about a two-state solution. Ergo, hesought to isolate and severely damage Hamas anddrive a new wedge between the two Palestinian factions.

Behind all these maneuvers looms Israel’s occupationof Palestine, now in its fifth decade. Not contentwith having ethnically cleansed hundreds ofthousands of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 and notsatisfied with owning 82% of Palestine, every Israeligovernment since 1967 has built or expanded settlementsin the West Bank and East Jerusalemwhile providing generous subsidies to the 600,000-plus Jews who have moved there in violation of theFourth Geneva Convention.

Two weeks ago, Netanyahu confirmed whatmany have long suspected: He is dead set against atwo-state solution and will never—repeat never—allow it to happen while he is in office. Given thatNetanyahu is probably the most moderate memberof his own cabinet and that Israel’s political systemis marching steadily rightward, the two-state solutionis a gone goose.

Worst of all, the deaths of hundreds more Palestiniansand a small number of Israelis will changealmost nothing. Hamas is not going to disband.When this latest round of fighting ends, the 4.4 millionPalestinians who live in the West Bank andGaza will still be Israel’s de facto prisoners and stillbe denied basic human rights. But they are notgoing to leave, mainly because Palestine is theirhomeland, but also because they have nowhere togo, especially given the turmoil in other parts of theMiddle East.

Eventually the dead will be buried, the woundedwill recover, the tunnels now being destroyed willbe rebuilt and Hamas will replenish its stockpile ofmissiles and rockets. The stage will then be set foranother round of fighting, and Israel will havemoved further down the road to becoming a full-fledgedapartheid state.

Impotent & Morally Bankrupt

Meanwhile, U.S. politicians and policymakerscontinue to back a brutal military campaign whoseprimary purpose is not to defend Israel but ratherto protect its longstanding effort to colonize theWest Bank. Amazingly, they continue to support Israelunreservedly even though every U.S. presidentsince Lyndon Johnson has opposed Israel’s settlementsproject, and the past three American presidents—Clinton, Bush and Obama—have allworked hard for the two-state solution that Israeli policy has now made impossible.

Yet as soon as fighting starts, and even if Israelinstigates it, AIPAC demands that Washingtonmarch in lockstep with Tel Aviv. Congress invariablyrushes to pass new resolutions endorsingwhatever Israel decides to do. Even though it ismostly Palestinians who are dying, White House officialsrush to proclaim that Israel has “the right todefend itself,” and President Barack Obama himselfwon’t go beyond expressing “concern” aboutwhat is happening.

Of course Israelis have the right to defend themselves,but Palestinians not only have the sameright, they have the right to resist the occupation.To put this another way, Israel does not have theright to keep its Palestinian subjects in permanentsubjugation. But try finding someone on CapitolHill who will acknowledge this simple fact.

The explanation for America’s impotent andmorally bankrupt policy is the political clout of theIsrael lobby.

Obama knows that if he were to side with thePalestinians in Gaza or criticize Israel’s actions inanyway, he would face a firestorm of criticism fromthe lobby and his chances of getting congressionalapproval for a deal with Iran would evaporate.

Similarly, every member of the House and Senate—including progressives like Senator ElizabethWarren (D-Mass.)—knows that voting for those supposedly “pro-Israel” resolutions is the smart politicalmove. They understand that even the slightestdisplay of independent thinking on these issuescould leave them vulnerable to a well-funded opponentthe next time they’re up for re-election. Ata minimum, they’ll have to answer a flood of angryphone calls and letters, and, on top of that, they arelikely to be blackballed by some of their congressionalcolleagues.

The safer course is to mouth the same tired litaniesabout alleged “shared values” between Israeland the U.S. and wait until the crisis dies down.And people wonder why no one respects Congressanymore.

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Israel’s Clout Evaporating

To be sure, the lobby’s clout is not as profound asit once was. Public discourse about Israel, U.S. policytoward Israel and the lobby itself has changedmarkedly in recent years, and a growing number ofjournalists, bloggers and pundits—such as AndrewSullivan, Juan Cole, Peter Beinart, M.J. Rosenberg,Max Blumenthal, Phyllis Bennis, Bernard Avishai,Sara Roy, Mitchell Plitnick, David Remnick, PhilWeiss and even (occasionally) Thomas Friedmanof The New York Times—are willing to speak andwrite candidly about what is happening in the MiddleEast.

Although most Americans openly support Israel’sexistence, their sympathy for an Israel thatacts more like Goliath than David is fading. The ranks of the skeptics include a growing number ofyounger American Jews, who find little to admireand much to dislike in Israel’s actions and who arefar less devoted to it than were previous generations.Pro-peace groups such as J Street and JewishVoice for Peace reflect that trend and show thatopinion among American Jews is far from unified.

Moreover, AIPAC and other hardline lobbygroups could not convince the Obama administrationto intervene in Syria, and they have been unableto convince the Bush or Obama administrationsto launch a preventive strike against Iran’snuclear infrastructure. They have also failed to derailthe nuclear negotiations with Tehran—at leastso far—though not for lack of trying. Pushing theU.S. toward another Middle East war is a lot for anyinterest group to accomplish, of course, but thesesetbacks show that even this “leviathan among lobbies”does not always get its way.

$3 Billion in Aid Keeps Flowing

But the lobby is still able to keep roughly $3 billionin U.S. aid to Israel flowing each year. It canstill prevent U.S. presidents from putting meaningfulpressure on Israel. It can still get the U.S. towield its veto whenever a resolution criticizing Israel’sactions is floated in the UN Security Council.

This situation explains why the Obama administrationmade zero progress toward “two states fortwo peoples”: If Israel gets generous U.S. supportno matter what it does, why should its leaders payany attention to Washington’s requests? Obama andSecretary of State John Kerry could only appeal toNetanyahu’s better judgment, and we’ve seen howwell that worked.

This situation is a tragedy for all concerned, notleast for Israel itself. A Greater Israel cannot beanything but an apartheid state. Israel’s Arab subjectswill eventually demand equal rights, and asformer Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warnedback in 2007, once that happens, “the state of Israelis finished.”

Unfortunately, AIPAC, the Anti-DefamationLeague, the Conference of Presidents of MajorAmerican Jewish Organizations and assorted ChristianZionist groups continue to exhibit a severecase of tunnel vision. Because defending Israel nomatter what it does is their main raison d’etre (andcentral to their fundraising), they are unable to seethat they are helping Israel drive itself off a cliff.Similarly, those pliant members of Congress whocravenly sign AIPAC-drafted resolutions are nottrue friends of Israel. They are false friends whopretend to care but are really only interested in gettingreelected.

Historians will one day look back and ask howU.S. Middle East policy could be so ineffectual andso at odds with its professed values—not to mentionits strategic interests. The answer lies in thebasic nature of the American political system,which permits well-organized and well-funded specialinterest groups to wield significant power onCapitol Hill and in the White House.

In this case, the result is a policy that is bad forall concerned: for the Palestinians most of all, butalso for the U.S. and Israel as well. Until the lobby’sclout is weakened or politicians grow stiffer spines,Americans looking for better outcomes in the MiddleEast had better get used to disappointment and be prepared for more trouble.

Stephen M. Walt is a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is also the co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which documents the remarkable level of financial and diplomatic support America provides to Israel and argues that this support cannot be fully explained on strategic or moral grounds.

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